Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —
The spacecraft owned by the United States Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), InSight has lost contact on Mars. It’s time and pension?
With dust covering the solar panels, InSight lost the ability to recharge for months. In spring, InSight operates at only one-tenth of its landing power.
Now a thick layer of dust may have put InSight into retirement, according to reports TechCrunch.
NASA announced on December 19 that the InSight lander was not responding to communications from Earth and “it is assumed that InSight may have reached the end of its operations”.
InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport, landed on Mars on November 26, 2018. Its mission studied the internal structure and composition of Mars for 709 sols or 728 days (Earth time)
Like many of NASA’s Mars robots, the lander far exceeded its planned mission duration. As of Dec. 20, Insight counted 1,445 soles on Mars.
InSight’s death by dust was not unexpected. Due to space and weight considerations, the lander was not equipped with a dust removal tool, relying on the fickle Martian winds to clean the solar panels.
NASA said on the Mars extended lander on April 25, 2022 that it would continue InSight seismic and meteorological monitoring if the spacecraft remained healthy.
However, due to dust buildup on the solar arrays, InSight’s power output was low and it was impossible to continue the mission.
NASA intends to try to contact InSight again, but if it loses two communications in a row, the team will officially announce the end of the mission.
“After that, NASA’s Deep Space Network will listen for a while, just in case,” he wrote. NASA on the official site.
(can/arh)
